How to Nurture Global Ambition: A Chat with John Bradford of Springboard [Wamda TV]

Springboard is an
intensive 13-week mentor-led business accelerator program based in
London and Cambridge that offers entrepreneurs office space, seed
capital and over $150,000 of free services. More than half the
companies that enter Springboard have raised a second round of
funding.

At the Webit
congress in Istanbul this past October 2012, Springboard
co-founder John
Bradford discussed investment opportunities for regional
companies and whether location matters for businesses that want to
go global.

Irish-born Bradford has concluded, based on his experience, that
location does not matter. “The wonderful thing about globalization
is that it allows you to have a global ambition. Somebody described
to me, where do you live, and he said 1B. That’s the first seat in
the front row on a airplane. That’s what you want to encourage. you
want to keep people moving and meeting other smart people,” he
says.

Bradford went onto say that none of the teams in this year’s cycle
at Springboard are from the U.K; rather, they are from Shanghai,
South Korea, Lithuania, Romania, Germany, New York, Austria, and
the west coast of the US. “They spend 13 weeks in a room and we
push pizza under the door,” he says of the boot camp
experience.

When it comes to the Middle East market, Bradford says, “after the
UK and Germany, Turkey is the third most-interesting market. I see
Turkey as a nation of potential entrepreneurs.”